Human Workplace CEO and founder Liz Ryan
has lots of good advice in this recent post on LinkedIn Today – but seriously,
this personal branding malarkey has gotta stop right now.

In case you didn’t know, Liz Ryan is the
founder of a business called Human
Workplace, and much what they stand for is just great. In essence, the
business is a think tank, consulting firm, search firm and an online community.
The team works with employers to re-invent HR and leadership practices to
support people, not policies, and they do it all with a ‘human voice’.

Yes, it’s true. I AM just like the people
Liz was quoting in her opening par. “People protest,” she wrote: “‘Oh, I don't
have a personal brand, and I don't want one’ but that's like saying ‘I choose
not to cast a shadow when I walk in the sun.’"

A cute baby does not have a personal brand!

Actually Liz, I don’t think that’s right. When
you support your argument by saying that: “You've got a brand. Newborn babies
have their own brands ("Ooh, have you seen Amanda's little Dexter? He's so
strong, he can hold his head up already and he has the cutest mop of
curls!")!” I think you’re off your freakin’ rocker.

How does the fact that people ooh and ah
over a baby’s curls demonstrate he has a brand? He’s a cute baby for goodness
sake, nothing more.

Here’s the thing: A brand is a story and
it’s a real life story told in three
acts. Act 1 is the promise, act two is the experience and act three is the
memory. I believe it should also be an honest
story – which is what I lay out in the True Story Marketing Manifesto – but it’s a carefully crafted story nonetheless.

Now let’s think about a human being. As Carrie Fisher said so well and so long ago in her book Postcards from the Edge, “I’m not a box; I don’t have sides”. What
did she mean? I think she’s saying: We’re flesh and blood. We’re history. We’re
desires. We’re at times conflicting interests; passions for everything from
felting to fast cars; from business to boxing.

Of course, as you say, people form opinions
about us, but that’s nothing to do with branding. And while you may sympathise
with people like me for whom the term ‘personal branding’ is a term that makes
them want to ‘hurl’, I also don’t believe it’s a surrogate for what you
describe as “just a newish term for self-description and reputation, two
phenomena that have existed for millennia”.

All that said, there are some people who do
have personal brands like say Tiger Woods, or Serena Williams, but in their
cases, the brand – around which an industry is built - is merely eponymous.

The same cannot be said for most people –
and nor do they have the potential to create one.

Don’t get me wrong; people DO need to
market themselves – especially in the job market and as business owners and
entrepreneurs. To do that they do, as you quite rightly suggest, need to “simply
tell your story. Use the first person, and write a paragraph or two that lays
out where you came from and what you care about. Skip the corporate-speak
jargon and sound like a human being.”

With those sentiments I couldn’t agree
more. But that’s not developing a ‘personal brand’. That’s sharing yourself.
And ultimately, the people who will probably be the most desirable and
influential in both job markets and other spheres, will be the tribe leaders
and the lynchpins (hat off to Seth Godin here) – not the people in pursuit of
some spurious notion of a personal brand.